


Going Deeper

by Vulture (ASocratesGoneMad)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-04 07:15:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6647740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ASocratesGoneMad/pseuds/Vulture
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At an unspecified time in the 1990s, Dominic Cobb assembled the best dream-thieves in the world for a job everyone thought was impossible: Inception. That was fifteen years ago. Now it's an unspecified time in the 2010s, and the next generation of extractors are grappling with a government monopoly on the dream-drug Somis, and the eternal, irresistible urge to go deeper into the world of dreams.</p>
<p>Fair warning: this is a work in progress, and already-posted chapters may well end up being revised later. Major alterations, if/when they happen, will probably be mentioned in the notes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Extractor

This Mexican guy was vaping in the elevator. Dr. Linklater adjusted his tie uncomfortably. There were only three of them in the elevator. At first he'd thought it was a cigarette, but the distinctive blue ring around the tip gave it away. It didn't smell like smoke. More like weed, actually. _If he's vaping pot in the elevator I can get his ass fired,_ he thought. That was comforting. He could already nail the guy for smoking anything, but pot would get him the boot immediately. Probably deserved it.

The guy waddled up to him, e-cigarette still between his lips. Dr. Linklater wrinkled his nose, and the guy blew a smoke ring right into his face. He coughed in disbelief. It was hard to even get air back into his lungs, there was so much of this fucking stuff in the elevator. He was _definitely_ getting this asshole fired for-

His knees started to feel weak. He saw the guy with the e-cig collapse to the floor in front of him, a smirk on his face. What-

~~~

and in the burning crucible where Adam lay it was night, and the day was gunfire and blood and screaming dreams over the sun over the hot rubber tarpit tennis court cool jazz burned his ears like a crucible and he wanted to crying again and his mother told him wait no look out over there for the

"Got it. Soliciting a prostitute, really? That's pretty pathetic," said the Mexican guy, rifling through a briefcase. His briefcase. That Mexican guy had stolen his briefcase.

"My name is Eric, by the way. I don't appreciate being 'that Mexican guy'," he added.

The briefcase wasn't in his hand. The documents- that he wanted to... shred... why had he typed out his affair and kept it in an unlocked briefcase, anyway?

"How did you know what I was thinking about you in my head?" he asked.

"It's all in the papers," the guy answered, tapping the stapled stack he had pulled out of the briefcase.

Dr. Linklater struggled to his feet, trying to keep balanced in what he had thought was his office but was now starting to look a lot like his old elementary school.

"You can't talk about what you read there! Please!" he shouted. The guy shrugged.

Then he woke up.

~~~

The elevator stopped on floor 13. It was a maintenance floor. Nobody cares if cleaning ladies get bad luck, he mused. As the doctors in the elevator struggled to their feet, coughing and trying to wake themselves up, he slipped out and into the next elevator over, going down. He took off his sunglasses and undid his ponytail, just for good measure. On the way out, he called up his dispatcher.

"Hey, this is Diego."

"Hi."

"So I got the deets on Doctors Bridge and Linklater. A hundred milligrams turned out to be just fine, inhalation-wise. Gave me about a minute and a half, dream-time, I'd say? So it was cutting it a little bit close, but I got out fine. I'm leaving right now."

"You're talking to me in the lobby?!"

"Well, not anymore. Just walked out the door," he said, deftly stepping around a distracted administrator who was coming in the same way. There was an exasperated sigh on the other end of the line. His dispatcher hung up.

He shook his head. The FBI was paying him fifty grand a job to lift documents and personal details out of the minds of important people (and unimportant people), and yet apparently they didn't trust him to speak discreetly in a hospital lobby. It was an easy job; most of his victims had no idea what was coming. You just knocked them (and yourself) out, stepped into their dream, and waltzed right off with any information you could want. He had it down to a science.

His employer had never bothered to fill him in on exactly how this worked, which bothered him sometimes. He had been informed that it was "classified", for "national security reasons", whatever that meant. He was happy to keep badgering them about it. They seemed to value his skills, so he figured he could get away with being a little bit of a pain in the neck when he wanted to.

Money was money, that was the important part. Money was money was money was money. Always was and always would be.

He climbed into his old dented Chevy and drove home.

 

* * *

 

That night, he couldn't sleep. Tomorrow was wide open - he just had to bring some money and stuff down to mom's apartment, and the he could spend the rest of the day reading or tinkering with his computer or... something.

He tossed himself over in bed. It was hard to motivate yourself to sleep, when you knew you couldn't dream. That was how they kept you hooked; those government bastards. Once you started taking Somis, regularly, working with it three or four days a week, it got so your brain couldn't dream without it. If he slept, no dreams would come. Just a timeless instant of nothing, and then a gradual awakening whenever the hell he felt like getting up tomorrow.

He rolled over and got out of bed. There was still a tiny bit of Somis left in the fridge. He'd used a little bit less of a dose than he'd reported when he broke into the local engineering college, because he didn't feel like admitting to his superiors that he'd just flirted with the secretary and then locked her in a broom closet instead of knocking her out and blackmailing her the way he was "supposed" to.

He picked up the little glass vial and swirled its contents around. Barely a half-centimeter deep. He swirled the clear, milky dregs around and around, trying to decide what to do with them. He had an instinctive disgust for needles (and didn't have any around, anyway), so that was out. He _did_ still have that vape pen that they'd given for the last job. He could just, actually inhale from that, rather than blowing it all around the room. That should work.

He dragged out the vape pen, and lay down in bed. It probably wouldn't be enough to knock him out for long, so he'd take some regular old NyQuil with it first. Never let it be said that Diego Riviera failed to think through what he was doing with drugs.

He breathed in, and let the dreams wash over him.

 

* * *

 

The call came in the early morning. It was a CIA guy – not his dispatcher. Nobody he was familiar with.

"I hope you haven't been hoarding your Somis, Diego." The voice sounded stern.

He fidgeted. "Uh, not at all. I think I might have accidentally left some of the dregs lying around after I-"

"Listen. There used to be a multibillion-dollar global black market in Somis. Did you know that?"

Diego sweated. "No," he said.

"It's very hard to manufacture, but of course, small quantities can do a great deal of harm. Millionaire opiate addicts looking for the next fix. Cult leaders in India trying to keep their faithful tethered to the faith. Corporate espionage. Brainwashing."

"Why do you say 'used to be'?" he asked.

"Because the United States government crushed every single supplier, distributer, and illegal user in the world. A lot of them had to be extradited, of course, but that's no hardship for an agency like ours."

Diego said nothing.

The man spoke again. "You ever hear about Dom Cobb?" he asked.

"I don't think so," Diego said.

"For shame. You ought to keep up with the tabloids, kid. Long story short, he was living large off the profits from some mercenary work in the corporate world using Somis. We tracked him down, looked over his files, and managed to get him back in court over his wife's death. He's rotting in prison for manslaughter now, I believe. Life sentence."

"Christ."

"So, don't play around with your Somis supplies. Use them for their intended purpose, and don't get any funny ideas. If you ever feel like dreaming, you look for a job from us. Comprende?"

"Yessir," he said.

Of course, what this meant was that he'd have to find someone who really understood this Somis stuff - so that next time, he could be sure that he'd get away with it.


	2. The Dreamers

He wanted to _dream_.

He felt strangled. The CIA had him by the short hairs; without them, he could barely sleep, and he'd never dream again. He wasn't sure where else he could work, either; his mom's medical expenses would quickly eat up his savings if he ever quit, generous as his income was.

He felt trapped, trapped, trapped, trapped, trapped. And he hated feeling trapped.

In desperation, he turned his laptop away from the window - where a government tail was parked across the street - and opened up tor broswer. Back when he was selling harder stuff, he used to just buy from darknet markets and then sell the haul at a markup on the street. Nobody noticed; it pays to be the most computer-literate competitor in your area.

He wasn't expecting to be able to find Somis. But he trawled around on the forums, on the onions subreddit, and eventually ended up cycling through a bunch of Somis-related keywords on a darknet search engine. It was worth a shot, right?

Of course, nobody was selling it, anywhere. In any form. But there was one posting (on a conspiracy BBS board, no less) that caught his eye. It was somebody who called themselves “Argon”, located in the United States, who said they were looking for “experienced thieves and extractors of knowledge and information from dreams”. That was a dog-whistle if he'd ever heard one – more like a foghorn, really. It must have been posted by somebody in the know.

He set up a tormail, refreshed himself on PGP, and got in touch with the guy. He wasn't able to extract many details about what the guy wanted him for – other than vague allusions to a “utopian project”, whatever the hell that meant – but at least it was obvious that he knew what he was talking about. In their emails, Argon was the first to use the word “Somis”.

Eventually, they arranged a place to meet. A cafe in San Francisco, in three weeks. Diego figured that would be enough time. San Francisco was a short plane flight away, so in that sense it wouldn't be difficult to make the meeting. He certainly had plenty of money, and he'd been promised a million dollars upfront, if he took them up on their offer, whatever it was. But – even though he was sure this wasn't a sting (if it was, he could sue for entrapment; he'd been very careful in his conversations with Argon to keep it that way) – his employers probably wouldn't be major fans of him meeting up with these guys. There was no way that Argon and his people had failed to register on their radar.

So, the problem was going to be: getting to California. Getting in touch with Argon. _Without_ getting fifteen bullets through his skull from the tail that the CIA had kindly provided for him. It was a puzzle; and he _loved_ puzzles.

He came up with a plan.

  


**Step one**. He put on his coat with the big pockets, and drove to the closest Walgreens. He wasn't going to shoplift (for a number of reasons), he just wanted to hide the stuff he bought while he was walking out the door.

 **Step two:** He bought a big square of posterboard, an Xacto knife, and a burner cell phone -- one of the fancy ones, that looked a lot like an actual smartphone. On the way out the door, he struggled dramatically with the posterboard (which didn't take a lot of acting, to be honest), and quietly slipped the box containing the burner cell phone into one of his jacket's spacious inner pockets. He rolled up the poster board and stuck it in the back seat, where it blocked about 80% of the rear window, then climbed into his car.

 **Step three:** Driving one-handed, he surreptitiously shucked the plastic packaging off of the Xacto knife, and used it to cut open the packaging of the burner phone, which was still in his inside pocket. The pocket got a little sliced up, which was too bad, but he had the phone in his hand. He even managed to slide the SIM card in without taking it out (which nearly swerved him off the road).

 **Step four:** With a little sleight of hand, he swapped his own beat-up old phone with the now ready-to-use burner in his pocket. Hopefully, with the help of the poster board obscuring his back window, the tail wouldn't have noticed anything was up.

 **Step five:** Quickly turning on the burner phone, he called up the biggest Papa John's in downtown Palm Desert. His brother worked there, and if his understanding of time zones was correct he ought to be on duty right now.

Someone picked up. Not his brother. "Hello, this is Papa John's delivery, what can I get for you today?"

He tried to make himself sound panicky and out of breath. It wasn't hard. "Hi. I'm Diego Rivera. My brother Carl works there. He should be there right now. This is an emergency, I can't get ahold of him any other way-" He tried to make himself sound like he was on the verge of tears, which was a little harder.

The girl on the other end seemed to be unsure what to do. Obviously, they weren't exactly supposed to connect random callers to their coworkers for personal conversations. "Please," he begged.

"It's a matter of life or death."

Which was perfectly true. Eventually, she reluctantly handed the phone to Carl. "Please make it quick," she said.

 **Step six:** "Diego? What the hell is this?! Whatever you've gotten yourself into, I want no part of it," he said. He was yelling in Spanish, presumably for the benefit of his coworkers.

He spoke in Spanish, too. "Look, Carl, this isn't about drugs. I'm working for the government now. I only need one thing from you - look, I'm going to be in California next week. I need you to pick me up from the airport, and I need you to bring along a black leather American Eagle jacket like mine, a red bandana with the normal pattern, and stone-washed jeans with blue number five. Are you writing this down?" he asked.

"Diego, what the fuck is this," his brother asked.

"What the fuck this is, is that I have a tail that's going to be monitoring my actions and protecting me, and I need to get away from it. You're going to pretend to be me, and I'll pretend to be you; I'll drop you off at mom and dad's house, and then I'll go complete my errands," he added, vaguely.

"Visiting mom and dad is a big favor, Diego. I expect a cut of whatever money you're getting out of this," he said.

"Fine. You'll get half a million when it's over with," he said.

Carl didn't immediately respond. His brother had never actually taken him up on any of his half-joking requests for money. Obviously, this was serious. "It's a deal," he said.

"Deal," said Diego, then hung up and picked the SIM card out of the phone, which he dropped on the floor and crushed with his boot. The SIM card went out the window in an empty chip bag.

He drove home.

  


* * *

  


As it turned out, Argon was a tall, paunchy middle eastern man, with flyaway mad-scientist hair and a fairly impressive-looking beard. Based on his hair and his glassy, far-off expression, Diego thought he looked like he ought to be wearing a white robe and handing out LSD, but he was actually just wearing a black polo shirt and jeans.

"Nice to meet you," he said. "I guess you know me as Argon, but since you've managed to pull yourself together and actually come to the arranged meeting, I think you can call me Moses. Moses Strangelove."

"Moses... Strangelove?"

"Also not my real name, obviously, but one can never be too careful, you know? And it sounds more like a real name that just calling me 'Argon'" he said. Then he laughed good-naturedly. "Chill out, my friend. You're done with the really hard part.”

Diego wasn't sure what to say, but luckily Argon- or Moses, rather, just kept on talking.

Taking on an expression of dramatic mock-suspicion, he said “By the way... you know that you were followed here, right?”

"My tail is currently waiting outside my parents' house in Palm Springs, watching to see if my twin brother is going to leave to get a sandwich. I'm good at what I do, Mister Strangelove," he said.

The man's expression seemed to lose its color. "We got rid of your tail, Diego. We've got a man on the inside. There's no one following you," he said.

 

Fuck. "Fuck," he said. "Then I owe my brother half a million dollars for no reason at all. Thanks for that, my buddy," he said. That probably wasn't the smartest thing to say to the guy who was probably going to be, in some sense, his new boss. But he was mad.

Moses Strangelove looked genuinely sorry. "I'm sorry, Diego. We can't tell people everything over the internet. It's still impressive, you know; evidence that you're thinking hard about the things you do. That's a very good sign. I think Phillip was right about you," he said.

"Who?" he asked.

Moses smiled. "That's not important right now. Since I have you in person, why don't I explain to you exactly what we're _really_ all intending to do, here," he said.

"Wait," Diego said.

"What?"

"I need to call my brother. He's going to be at my parents' forever if I don't, and I don't think he could ever forgive me for that."

  


* * *

  


In a car across the street, an agent of the FBI who'd been assigned to tail Diego Rivera was taking very careful notes.


	3. The Dreamers, pt. 2

> Why are there so many songs about rainbows  
>  and what's on the other side?  
>  Rainbows are visions, but only illusions,  
>  and rainbows have nothing to hide.  
>  So we've been told and some choose to believe it.  
>  I know they're wrong, wait and see.  
>  Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection.  
>  The lovers, the dreamers and me.
> 
> \- _The Rainbow Connection_ (The Muppet Movie) 

“What are we doing here? This is a utopian project, Mr. Rivera. In a stable dreamstate, it's possible to build constructs – buildings, cities, anything. And the dreamer has control. Time inside a Somis-induced dream goes twelve times faster than time here. Take Somis inside that dream, and you'll experience time 144 times slower than you would at the surface. One deeper, and the factor is 1728. And so on. It increases exponentially. This kind of nesting is useful for purposes like Inception, where it's necessary to have the subject pass through multiple amnesiate states of consciousness in order to convince themselves that your idea emerged from their own subconscious; but, taking a less myopic view, there are certain other obvious things one could do with a world running thousands and thousands of times slower than reality, a world over which one person can have godlike control.

With enough volunteers, you could create a paradise, Mr. Rivera. A paradise of almost eternal glory. Heaven on earth. A slow-moving, eduaimonic paradise of true believers who will know death only as temporary inconvenience; after which they may go back to sleep, and continuing dreaming of utopia for another thousand thousand thousand years. Imagine that, Mr. Rivera. All you would need is a good number of open-minded volunteers and a bunker. And, of course, a truly unholy quantity of Somis,” he said, flashing a somewhat enigmatic grin.

 

“I get to give you the grand tour,” Moses said, leading him down the hallway of their suspiciously spacious offices – the whole seventeenth floor of a skyscraper wasn't cheap to rent; it was clear that these guys had resources.

They stopped at the first door down.

"This is Phillip," Moses said, gesturing to the person behind the desk. He was short, rosy, and wore little wire-frame glasses that looked like they belonged to a previous decade. He seemed to be about fifteen or sixteen years old. Diego reached over and patted the kid's arm affectionately.

“Robbing the cradle, are we, Mr. Strangelove?” he asked. For some reason Moses was vigorously shaking his head, and mouthing the word “no” at him over and over again.

Phillip looked up at Diego with cold contempt. "First of all, I am twenty-five, you irreversible stain on humankind. Height, you will be surprised to learn, is not a perfect correlate of age. I also have a greater net worth than Australia, I could buy and sell you in an instant, and I'm an invaluable asset to this project because I was trained under the greatest extractor of our parents' generation. If you ever lay a hand on me again, literally or metaphorically, I will break your fingers and your career, in that order,” he said. Diego removed his hand.

“Phillip is the son of Dom Cobb, and he inherited most of his father's talent as well as his financial assets. The remainder of each is being wasted on some high-security prison or other, of course,” Moses said. Phillip didn't visibly respond to this; he had gone back to typing rapid-fire on his desktop computer, with the vaguely irritated expression of someone trying to fight off a headache.

“There are other people to meet,” Moses said hurriedly.

 

“Phillip is hard to work with, but he really is a valuable asset. Just don't get on his bad side, and you'll be fine,” he said.

“Am I not already on his bad side?”

Moses shook his head. “You'd know if you were on his bad side,” he said. Then, firmly changing the subject, he added, “You're obviously really good with computer stuff, right?”

Diego laughed. “I mean, I really just tinker around with Linux in my free time, that doesn't mean I'm-”

“Nonsense! I know the type! What I'm saying is, you ought to meet Ariadne. You'd probably appreciate her way of explaining our mechanical setup – half of it goes over my head, frankly,” he said, making a silly expression.

 

Moses led him into a relatively spacious room, full of various things covered in white sheets or with half their parts spilling out all over the floor. Diego was pretty sure he didn't recognize any of the objects here.

A severe-looking middle-aged woman in a lab coat walked over to them and firmly shook Diego's hand. “This is the new guy?” she asked. Moses nodded.

“This is Diego,” he said.

“I'm Ariadne, pleased to meet you. I'm an engineer and an architect, both in dreams and in reality. Frankly, working in dreams is a lot easier; I wish it was all I ever did. Do you want me to show him around?” she asked, turning to Moses. He nodded. She started walking back into the spacious workshop, and he followed.

“I hope you don't mind needles, Diego. I'm probably gonna be sticking stuff into your veins a lot. I have about half a medical license, don't worry,” she said.

"Why not just use gas?" he asked.

She snorted. "Gas? Gas works fine for very quick extractions, where you don't need a stable dreamscape or anywhere that you're going to be spending more than a minute or two. You'd go insane if you tried to pull off a complicated operation in someone who'd been gassed, or who was just on an uncontrolled drip. In order to have a stable state, we have to use these," he said, picking up a shiny metal tube. "This thing has about seven spools of tubing, and room to attach up to fifty more. It's got programmable dose control, which we can use to make sure that the Somis gets to the dreamer in doses that match up to their natural brain cycles, and gets to the rest of you in mostly consistent doses, except for during spikes or whatever. I know you're not interested, I just like the sound of my own voice," he added.

"Why's it in a big cylinder, then? That sounds like the kind of thing you could run from a smartphone," he said.

She sighed. "Well, truth be told, this isn't our technology. We stole one protoype of this thing from the CIA, courtesy of our guy on the inside, and we just reverse-engineered it. They have custom arduinos, so I can't read the machine code at all. They could probably shrink it down, but government loves outdated technology. Just be glad it isn't still the 90s - these things used to be the size of briefcases," she added.

"Normally, of course, you can't go much deeper than two or three levels of dreaming, and even then only by using very powerful sedatives - because physical tremors, or other stimuli that might wake someone up or invite disasters into their dreamscape, are transmitted from the world to the dream by way of the the dreamer's sensations, so if you deaden their sensations you can lessen the danger. But even if every dreamer was in a coma, for example, you wouldn't be able to keep a tower of five dreams stable; a microtremor on the top level would translate to planet-destroying quakes on the bottom. The only sedative that could fix that is cyanide," she said.

"So how is this forty-levels-deep stuff not a pipe dream?" he asked.

"Because we're not going to be relying on just sedatives, the way they did in the bad old days. In fact, the horse tranquilizers are really just a precaution. We have these," she said, and with a dramatic gesture whipped a white cloth off of... a big, mechanical-looking box with a bunch of wires and stuff sticking out.

He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

"It's a sleep coffin. We get to call them that because we're not selling them to anybody," he said, with a smirk. "This is just a prototype, because there's usually no reason to spend a lot of money on building a bunch of these in the real world. On the top level, we can just use the horse tranquilizers. But on lower levels, where the dreamer has total ontological control, we can have them whip up a bunch of mechanical coffins. You lay in it, and it's filled with gel. Firm, breathable gel; it feels like you're drowning, but the stuff is oxygenated, so if you let it fill your lungs, you'll actually live. It also numbs you, like an anesthetic. That's useful for a number of reasons, not least of which is that for maximum effect we stab this needle right into your major artery, where the Somis can reach your brain as fast as possible. Also, there's a primitive brain-wave monitor -- really just a copper mesh -- that's tuned to a switch, so that if you're ever not in REM sleep, it kills you."

"It what?!"

"Well, actually, this one specifically doesn't. However much we plan not to use it on any actual person, I still figured there was no reason to include the lethal functionality in the, uh, floor model, as it were. But in the versions we construct in dreams, yes, that is what it does. Remember that Somis keeps your brain in a constant state of REM as long as it's active, so this is essentially just making sure that when you wake up and you're still in a dream, you don't have to go to the trouble of killing yourself," she said.

"Doesn't that take you down into Limbo, though? Wouldn't it make more sense for the coffin to, say, violently shake you awake?"

"No, it wouldn't. You're not thinking about this in the right way. Remember, the coffin can only affect its own level. The only way to have effective communication from a deeper level to a higher one is by coordinating from the top down – say, by using a musical cue, where the music is triggered at the top level. But for something unexpected like dying inside a dream, sadly the best option we have is to kill you, then have you die again in Limbo, and then descend through all the layers of dream back to where you started. It loses a lot of time, especially at very deep levels, but there really isn't any other way.”

“And are these things really stable enough to sustain however-many cultists you guys are gonna be piling up in your bunker or whatever?”

She gave him a kind of half-smile, and all she said was “That is an excellent question.”

Eventually, Moses came back from whatever-it-was that he had been doing, and insisted on introducing Diego to one more person.

“It was nice to meet you,” he said, shaking Ariadne's hand. He actually liked her, which he realized was a first among anybody in this place. She seemed at least remotely trustworthy.

Moses ushered him out the door.

 

"Here is our genius-in-residence!" he said loudly, leading him into a cramped little office where a wiry, tweedy little man was staring glassily at his laptop. The man blushed.

“Oh, please, Argon,” he said.

Moses persisted. "Come on, don't be modest!" he said, laughing. Eventually, thankfully, he excused himself from the room, and the tall man introduced himself to Diego.

"I'm Clark Carter, and I'm very pleased to meet you. Contrary to what, uh, Dr. Lovejoy likes to say, I'm actually not really involved in most of the important stuff here. I mostly do book research," he said.

"He introduced himself to me as Strangelove, first of all, but I'll forgive you that. What do you mean by book research?"

"Oh, humph. Names, names, names. Anyway, book research is just what it sounds like: since none of us have direct access to the FBI's information files on this technology, we're trying to put together our own history and dossier on the drug, including its more esoteric uses and effects. A lot of that is ancient Arabic sources - the poppy is very old, even if the refinement into Somis is new - which is the only reason a stuffy old medievalist like is involved in such an exciting project as this," he added, with a smile.

“Has that led to any interesting improvements in the way they use the drug?” Diego asked, trying to egg him on.

Clark polished his glasses. “Well, it has made them, uh, a little bit more cautious, maybe a lot more cautious,” he said.

“Why's that?”

"Well, you know, it's all just a matter of degree, you know, I'm really only just consolidating a variety of experiences-"

Diego pressed.

“Well – I mean, you have to take ancient sources with a grain of salt, especially occult and religious texts. A lot of what they say is metaphorical, or isn't meant to be understood in a really scientific way; but of course, it can be hard to tell what is poetic, and what is not. Not to mention that things change over time, and between different persons. All that we can really say for certain, Diego, is this: for Abul Alhazared, at the time that he recorded his experiences, there was something truly evil lurking in the depths of dream.”


	4. The Dreamers, part 3

Three weeks. Moses just wanted him to stay in California for two weeks of briefing, training, and team-building – this last he said with a smirk – and then he could go back home for a while. He could live in the office while he was here – they had plenty of room. The actual _thing_ that they were going to do wouldn't happen for at least another month after that. He was going to be the last recruit.

In fact, Moses confided in him, it was only because of Ariadne that they'd taken him on – apparently she'd said it was a travesty for such a clever and successful extractor to be stuck, well, extracting. Moses seemed to think there was something pretty significant about this, but whatever it was, he was deciding to play coy.

 

Ariadne was supposed to give him a more in-depth training in using their fancy dream-equipment, so he had the chance to ask her.

“Why did you get them to take me on?” he asked. She looked at him with something that looked like either sadness, or pity, or something else entirely – something he didn't quite recognize.

“When I was your age I was offered a job. I was a young architect, studying in Paris, having the time of my life, and Dominic Cobb – Phillip's father – offered me a job. He told me that it would be dangerous, and illegal, but he got me hooked on Somis and- well, you know the rest. It's the purest act of creation. Your own little universe in which to play God,” she said. He had never really thought about it like that.

“I guess so,” he said. “Not to mention physical dependency, of course.”

She didn't laugh, but she nodded, gravely.

“I did the job. It wasn't pretty; nothing more or less than emotionally brutalizing some kid, about my age at the time, because his energy magnate dad had just died, and they were trying to influence his direction splitting up the company. Cancer. Nasty stuff. Mr. Cobb was a consummate professional - but his demons surfaced more than most people's. Personally, I wouldn't have tried to perform inception if I couldn't even keep my dead wife from popping up everywhere and sabotaging the operation. But I'm not Dom Cobb. And he really was the best,” she said.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“Because you remind me of myself. You're young, stupid, you ask too many questions. Phillip is like his father, but this isn't going to be a Dom Cobb job. You're getting the royal treatment,” she said, and she smiled a smile that wasn't really a smile at all.

He didn't say much in response to that – he wasn't sure what to say, at all – and eventually, they moved on to business.

"So, the kind of jobs you're used to are quick, in-and-out, one-level jobs, right? You mentioned mostly using gas," she said.

"That's right."

"Okay. So the kind of shit we're gonna be practicing is not like that. This will also make you better at your regular jobs, by the way. We need to get you used to stable dreaming, _long_ dream sessions, and deploying Somis offensively and in combination with other sedatives. You understand?"

"I think so," he said.

"Good. Okay, lesson number one. Knocking someone out. You're used to, what, puffing a little smoke in their face, spending maybe twenty minutes dream-time hanging out and mugging them for their wallet or their ambassador briefcase or whatever, right? That's no good for multi-level, long-term work. Strictly speaking, we're only planning to work on voluntary subjects, but sometimes when a dream starts the dreamers forget what they were doing, or forget that they're in a dream, especially if they're not very experienced dreamers. So you might have to take them out offensively.

Also, Phillip likes to call in favors sometimes, on the basis that he's constantly keeping us from getting our asses kicked by the FBI. You'll want to be able to function well for those jobs, especially since he's already been annoyed with you once. He's a useful guy to have as a friend," she said.

Diego looked at her skeptically, but she ignored the look.

"So, knocking someone out. Please, I know this is a habit you've probably picked up from your fieldwork, but _please_ don't use Somis as the first sedative you hit someone with when you're trying to take them out. It's weak, it's finnicky to store and use, and it's really fucking expensive. We have a whole closet full of date rape drugs here, and each one is about a hundred times cheaper than blasting some Somis in their face. Okay?"

He nodded agreeably.

"So, if you can, knock them out first, so that the dream is stable and they don't wake up in the first thirty seconds. Roofies, tranquilizer dart, whatever. Choloroform is tempting but, you know, be careful with it. I trust that you can figure this stuff out on your own and not screw up," she said.

He nodded. “Yeah, I'm good with that kind of thing,” he said.

“Good,” she said, “Because that's not what you're going to be spending most of your time on here, while we're training you. You can try knocking Moses out a few times – he seems to enjoy it – but they're probably gonna have you mainly doing survival stuff. Since it's going to happen about forty times in real life, we want you to get lots of practice setting up dream coffins in a hostile environment.”

“I'm good at surviving,” he said, with a smirk.

“You'll need it,” she said.

 

* * *

 

 

It wasn't bad having a whole office floor to roam around in. Even when everyone was around, Diego felt like he would be able to find somewhere to be alone, simply because there were so _many_ rooms. Even with a few secretaries and things, there weren't very many of them.

It was easier, of course, when Phillip wasn't around - he mostly stayed in his office, but his _goons_ would wander all over the floor, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. They were big guys, and well-dressed, and from what he could tell they weren't stupid. They certainly didn't look like they had been hired off the street. But all they ever did was pace, and shoot these unnerving glares at everyone – except Phillip.

It made it incredibly hard to sleep; they seemed to work in twelve-hour shifts.

After a couple nights being kept up by these goons pacing around, he made the mistake of asking Phillip about it.

“What are those guys here for?” he asked.

“They are my personal guards and assistants. They work for me,” he answered, quietly.

“And you're paying out of our budget to have half a dozen guys pace around for twelve hours, every day?” he asked, incredulous.

“They run errands for me sometimes.”

“It still doesn't seem like a very economical use of our staffing budget,” he said.

There was a pause. Phillip sighed, and he met Diego's eyes with a cold stare. “I don't pay them,” he said.

“What?”

“I said, I don't pay them, don't worry. I am wise with my money, which is why I have so very much of it that I am an invaluable asset to this operation.”

“How are you making them do this, then?” Diego asked, pressing the issue. He suddenly felt that he very much needed to know the answer.

“I have ways of making people loyal.”

Diego waited.

Phillip looked at him with cold, dead eyes. "You know, they say that once you've lived with someone for a while, you start to develop a bond. A relationship. Some kind of _loyalty_. It's true, isn't it?" he said. "Imagine what it would be like to live with one person, just one person, for over _a hundred years_. Just that person. And you never interacted with anyone else. They controlled your food, your water, your clothing, your whole physical environment... your every aspect of your emotional life. Even the very nature of reality. You would be absolutely dependent on them. And then even if that period of your life ended, maybe that bond would stay in place. After all, against a hundred years of slavery, what is ten or twenty years as a free man? Such a person would never really be free again. And they would be absolutely loyal," he said, carefully articulating every syllable of those last two words.

There was nothing more to say. Diego didn't sleep any easier that night.

 

* * *

 

 

"So why is a _violent,_ _abusive_ _asshole_ who _nobody likes_ going to be coming down with you into this 'paradise' at all? Why do you _put up_ with him?" he asked.

Moses sighed, massaging the bridge of his nose, as if Diego was bothering him with some especially tiring tax form, rather than confronting him about the fact that one of his employees was _regularly violating the Geneva Convention_.

"Two reasons. First of all, he has money; idealistic Silicon Valley transhumanists only get you so far. Phil Cobb has one hell of a lot of liquid cash, let me tell you. Secondly, and more importantly, that smarmy bastard has his tentacles in the FBI – they pulled him in after his dad's arrest, and right now he's the only reason we haven't had our door bashed in a thousand times over for illegal use of Somis. Opsec only takes you so far; every once in a blue moon, Phillip can make them just turn a blind eye to something suspicious. That's absolutely invaluable."

“He's a creep,” Diego said.

“Oh, there we are in agreement. But he's a necessary creep. There are millions of years of human civilization at stake here, Diego.”

That was hard to argue with – or rather, Moses was hard to argue with. So he didn't.

 

He continued to pester Ariadne with questions.

"Okay, so what happens if you're inside someone's dream, and then you go inside another dream, and then in there you go inside the first person's dream *again*?"

"You mean, like, In A's dream B is dreaming, and in B's dream A is dreaming?"

"Yeah."

"You know, I'd never thought to try that," she said. "So I'm not really sure." Diego thought that was odd.

It _was_ odd. It was so odd, in fact, for a researcher in nested dreams to never have attempted the most basic of all convolutions, that it couldn't have been a coincidence at all. And it wasn't a coincidence. Not the slightest bit.

But of course neither of them knew this at the time; and they both quickly forgot about the conversation. Ariadne never bothered to try it.

 

* * *

 

 

Training was hard, obviously. Diego was an autodidact, in extraction as much as anything else. The FBI had given him the tool and the parameters for using it, and he had proven himself. Now he had to do _training exercises_ , and it annoyed him. These were _games_.

Not that he always won, of course. Some games were harder than others.

 

They were underwater. He felt like he was drowning. He flailed around, trying to reach the surface, but he wasn't even sure which way was up. There was light everywhere - were they in a sphere? It was hard to tell. He knew he couldn't breathe. He knew he was drowning.

And he knew that meant he was failing this test. Quickly, he tried to conjure up scuba gear in his mind, but his mouth had already opened up, and water was rushing into his lungs. His whole body felt suffused with a terrifying burning.

Out of the corner of his eye, stung though it was with seawater, he thought he could see the rest of the team, fighting something. A sea monster? So failing to drown was only part of the game. Phillip was swinging around what looked like a giant harpoon gun, and Dr. Carter - well, he only saw it for an instant, before he blacked out and floated to the surface - but just for a moment, it looked like Clark Carter was breathing fire.

 

Later, after Diego had spent a hour or two recovering his sanity and pride, he asked Dr. Carter about that.

“First of all, please stop calling me Dr. Carter. We're colleagues, now, my boy, and you're perfectly free to call me Clark. All this 'Doctor this', 'Professor that' – that's exactly what I left the university to get away from.

But as for the fire, yes. That was lovely, wasn't it? I wish you could have seen it up close. It's all a matter of chemistry, really. I have deep knowledge of chemistry, thank goodness, since that degree certainly hasn't given me anything else. Apparently these days a Bachelor's just doesn't cut it. Who knew?

But, anyway, I distract myself. Knowing chemistry – really knowing it, in your bones – that's the only way to pull of something like that. If I was a physicist I could probably conjure antimatter into a dream when I got tired of it. Boom! But chemistry is almost as good,” he said.

Diego's face fell a little bit. He never had been good at science, and he said so.

“Buck up, my boy! You're better at me than everything else in these exercises. There's no use trying to have everything, you know.”

 

* * *

 

 

One night, late in the second week, after everyone else had gone home (or locked themselves away to dream in private), Diego noticed that Clark was still lurking there, occasionally glancing in his direction.

“What's up, man?” he asked.

Clark looked startled. “I- there's something I wanted to show you,” he said. Diego looked at him in disbelief. And when he started to lead him up the back stairs and onto the roof, he was starting to get the sinking feeling in his stomach that he was going to have to _reject_ someone.

But Clark was looking up, not at Diego; he seemed transfixed by the stars.

“Is there something you were going to-”

“al-Hazred, in the last surviving document written in his hand, informs us that in his lifetime – and I use his words, quite literally translated, and as far as I know this is no idiom – he said, 'The things which I have seen, terrible and great, came to us for what purpose I know not; with what mission I know not; to seek what treasure, I know not. But they must have come very, very far, for the thing that spoke to me had traveled from beyond the stars.'

"'Beyond the stars'. That's an interesting phrase, isn't it? If we're to believe the physicists, the universe goes on and on forever, without terminus or abatememnt. And everywhere there are stars. Stars, stars, stars, an infinite panoply of stars. There are infinitely many stars in every direction from Earth. So what does that mean, then? According to physics, there literally cannot be such a thing as 'beyond the stars'," he said. He was acting ridiculous, and must have known it, but his face looked genuinely troubled.

"Well, I'm sure he didn't mean it literally, then. He must have just meant - beyond some stars. Or from somewhere far off in space. I can't imagine they were making such fine distinctions between those things, like, a thousand years ago," Diego said.

Clark arched his eyebrows. "You'd be surprised. They meant a lot of things in much cleverer ways than we arrogant moderns like to suppose. I think there's always something more to be learned from these texts, even if you think you know exactly what they mean," he said.

Diego was starting to lose patience with this, but he wasn't really sure how to leave, so for a long time they just sat in silence. The fear that he would have to put to rest some idea of mutual affection was rising in him again, when at last he broke the silence.

“Well, I think I've made my point. Remember to think about these things, my boy,” he said. And without saying anything more of significance, he finally went down the back stairs, packed up his things, and went home. Diego was alone.

 

Moses didn't have very much to say about it when Diego told him about the incident on the rooftop. In fact, he didn't even seem to feel it merited waiting until he was done with the banana that was the last remnant of his lunch.

“Yeah, he's a weirdo all right. That's the problem with guys who read all these ancient mystical texts; they start turning into mystics themselves. I wouldn't take anything he says too seriously,” he added, wiping some banana rind on his khakis. The matter was closed.

 

A couple days later, Diego went home again, at least for a while. His mother seemed to be in all right condition (as much as she ever was), although she really let him have it for going so long between visits. He felt terribly guilty.


End file.
